He gave this speech the night before he was assassinated.
Some of the best lyrics of all time:
Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride!
U2 - Pride (In The Name Of Love)
first time played live: 1984-08-29: Town Hall, Christchurch, New Zealand
last time played live: 2006-12-09: Aloha Stadium, Honolulu, Hawaii
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I realize to a lot of people the injustice meted out to Black America seems like ancient history but there are plenty here of a certain age group who remember and are struck by the civility of Rev King’s disobience. This excerpt from a ‘Letter from a Birmingham jail’ gives a glimpse to that time…
We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodyness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience …
I cried this morning when I heard parts of his speech and listened to the Story Corps segement on NPR this morning. A few men who were part of the sanitation workers strike were recollecting from that time. As a middle class white woman I will never ever know the pain, oppression and humiliation that those men went through. Hearing their stories made me realize how fortunate I am in the cards of life that I was dealt.
I wanted to bump this thread. MLK Jrs last speech. Happy Birthday, MLK.
I know the “I have a Dream” speech is the biggie, that it’s the one that he’s most remembered for, but it’s the mountaintop speech that always makes me tear up.